Casco Issues X

The Great Method

To think about method implies a reflection on the working procedures that all of us employ in our activities, and the – hidden or visible – processes that enable something to come into being. Where as in science the rules of investigation, steps and techniques of analysis and knowledge are very established, these days could one speak of one (or many) defined artistic methods in contemporary cultural practices?

Edited by Basque writer/curator Peio Aguirre and Casco’s director, Emily Pethick, Casco Issues X will address the question of methodology in artistic practice. It focuses on the presence or absence of methods, and their ideological connotations and historical backgrounds, in order to examine some of the conditions that surround contemporary art production.

‘The Great Method’ also refers to Bertolt Brecht’s unfinished ‘Me-ti, Book of Changes’, which was unpublished in his lifetime and has never been translated to English. In this Brecht reflected upon his own method and practice. As Fredric Jameson writes in his book ‘Brecht and Method’, here Brecht’s approach emerges as ‘the dynamic balance of opposites, the evolution of events as a process, and acceptance of the inevitability of change,’ foregrounding the potential of connecting things than might appear not to share common ground in order to form a more complex picture of the world.

The editorial of Casco Issues X leads out of this method of connecting things together. Artists were invited to think about the subject of method, or to reflect or demonstrate their own methods. Interlaced with quotes from Brecht’s ‘Me-ti’, translated to English by Ian Pepper, the contributions open up a variety of subjects that include notions of learning and unlearning, construction and deconstruction, mediation and translation, formalism and historicity, forms of participation, and the joining of practice and theory.